Charmed and Dangerous (35 page)

“Are you okay?” Trevor asked, as Bobbie Faye paced back and forth in front of the phone.

“Oh, sure, I’m okay. I’m perfectly okay. Do I not embody the profound okayness of an okay person? I’m so freaking okay, they’re going to make posters of me for ‘Okay, Central.’ Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

“Well, the head spinning and fire emanating from your ears might be a sign that all is not well.”

She gawked at him as he paused a moment in his efforts to block the stairwell with the guards’ desk. “Do you know what this is?” she asked, waving the tiara in his direction as they moved away from the guards, presumably to an exit.

“Well, in
my
universe, it’s a tiara.”

“Ha! Then you’d be wrong. This, this
thing
my great-great-great-grandfather made is valuable because of
who
he was. Jean Lafitte.
Jean Lafitte
. I’m related to Jean Lafitte. Me.
Related
. To a crazy, blackhearted pirate who ran over everyone to get what he wanted.”

“I’d say ‘pot’ meet ‘kettle,’ but I like the arrangement of all my limbs.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“What’s so hard to believe? He lived around here. Someone’s bound to be related to him.”

“Oh, no. No, you don’t understand. You know what I know? I know that my great-great-great-aunt Cora’s corns hurt her whenever she was going to have company, but that conveniently happened every Friday when the local butcher came by to make his deliveries. I know that my brilliant uncle Ansean and his friend decided to rob the liquor store and hung around all night playing pool and drinking and decided when it was getting daylight, that he wanted to take the pool table with him, and he couldn’t understand why in the world the police stopped him to question him. I know
fifty kazillion
useless
stupid things my idiot family has done and you know why? Because this is the South and we tell every single one of our crazy family stories to anyone who will listen for the sheer entertainment value, so you would think that, at some point, a couple of my relatives could have rubbed a few of their brain cells together and remembered to pass along the little nugget that we’re related to a freaking
pirate
. At least I might have known why the kidnapper wanted the stupid tiara.”

She stopped venting a moment, having to draw a breath, and heard a rumbling sound she couldn’t place, and she looked to Trevor, who frowned.

“I think your ex found the stairwell. And the barricade. It won’t hold him for long.”

She snatched a leftover piece of rope from what he’d used to tie the guards. “Great. Just freaking lovely.” She tied the tiara to a front belt loop. “The way things are going today, Cam will find out I’m related to a pirate and somehow, everything they ever did will be all my fault, and he’ll put me in jail so long there’ll be another ice age before I’m out.”

“What in the hell did you do to him?”

“Why does everyone always assume I’m the one who’s done something to the guy, huh? Why can’t it be that he did something to me? Is it because there’s some sort of testosterone signal that goes out and you instantly agree with each other to blame the woman?”

“Okay. So what did he do to you?”

“He arrested my sister.”

“What was she doing? Murder? Aggravated assault? Some other sort of genetically predisposed mayhem.”

“Geez. Thanks. It was a simple DUI.”

“Ah. You broke up, and he got revenge by arresting your sister.”

“No, we were dating. I’d told him she had a problem and I was worried about her and wanted to get her into detox, and he went and arrested her.”

Trevor scowled, puzzled. “You were still dating?”

She nodded.

“Seriously? As in, long term?”

“About a year.”

“And he arrested your sister?”

“Yep.”

“Was he suicidal?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, assuming he planned on seeing you again and possibly sleeping with you, he’d had to have had a death wish to pull a stunt like that. You don’t do that to the woman you’re dating, especially if you’re serious.”

“
Thank you
. He thinks he was doing the ‘right thing.’ ”

Metallic grinding and whirring noises filtered into the hallway and they slowed, listening to the sounds grow as they approached a large manufacturing area. There were giant chopping machines and packaging equipment and shipping conveyor belts all rusted from long-term exposure to drifts of salt. The conveyor angled up up up to what must be an exit several stories above the floor.

Bobbie Faye and Trevor hung back in the shadows. She counted seven workers on the floor and a manager on an elevated glassed-in platform where the glass protected the computer from the salt. On one wall, at a right angle to the manager’s platform, there was a plate glass window: a break room. Inside, a TV played the aerial footage of the bank robbery, and the anchors droned on and on. Two workers sat transfixed by the footage. Between the break room and the platform were two secretarial desks facing the promised land: another elevator.

The cutting machine shaved the salt blocks into smaller blocks, which were being wrapped in a plastic label and set on a conveyor. There were dozens of other smaller machines, all banging and whizzing and chirping, doing God-knows-what, motors running loud enough to drown out Bobbie Faye and Trevor’s whispered conversation.

She squinted and could see the footage details. She couldn’t be seeing what she thought she was seeing.

Her trailer.

Lying on its side.

Broken into halves.

She was going to kill Claude and Jemy, whose trucks and winches were still tied to the trailer as they tried to pull one of the halves upright.

No
.
Do not think that
. She was just going to think positive this time. What was Ce Ce always yammering about? Something about positive thinking creating the reality that you want to live in, and by thinking it, you create it?

So fine. Positive thinking. Positive fucking thinking. She could do positive thinking. Buddhist monks were going to line up to learn how to think as positively as she could think. She’d give seminars.

She heard the sound of dogs baying. Dim, far far away.

Growing louder.

The positive doohickey thing in her brain was apparently in the “off, and fuck you” position.

South Louisiana resident makes first million selling “Bobbie Faye” debris on eBay. Expects to double his sales next quarter.

—lead story in
Entrepreneur
magazine

Cam, the SWAT team, the FBI agents, the dog handler, and the dogs lined up in the crowded stairwell. The disabled elevator forced them up the stairs, which were, of course, blocked. The SWAT had tried kicking the door in, to no avail.

“Blow it,” Zeke said.

Cam shook his head, and pressed an ear against the door. He’d heard something. Muffled. Grunting.

“Someone’s tied up just on the other side. We can’t blow it or we could kill them.”

“Well, we don’t have the luxury of just waiting around,” Zeke barked. “Cormier could be getting away.”

“Since when did your mandate include killing innocent civilians?” Cam asked, enjoying the way Zeke had to bite back an answer.

Cam turned to Aaron. “We have any acetylene left?”

“A little.”

“Enough to cut off the hinges here? We could pull the
door forward to us if we make the cuts right. Then move whatever’s blocking the door.”

Aaron nodded, and in a few seconds, two of his team flared up the torches, one tackling the top hinge, the other, the bottom.

“The key,” Trevor whispered in her ear, “is not to sneak over to the elevator because that will draw the employees’ attention. Just walk normally, head down like you’re reading something.”

“Right, so I can walk straight into one of those machines which will probably fold me into some sort of origami figure and mail me somewhere.”

“Nah, those machines have large knives. They’re cutting the salt blocks. You’d never make it out whole enough to mail. See all of the poles between the workstations? They’re pretty evenly spaced. They’ve got telephones, looks like intercoms to the manager area. If you move toward those, if anyone notices you, they’ll probably just mistake you for an employee going to call the floor manager.”

Right. Because she looked so much like an
employee
with her
SHUCK ME, SUCK ME
shirt, now so filthy that the
SHUCK ME
was barely visible.

Trevor led the way. They walked casually, separated, and then moved around the machinery and the workstations. No one noticed either of them, from what Bobbie Faye could tell. She made her way slowly toward the elevator, backtracking twice to avoid workers she hadn’t been able to see until she turned a corner. She bumped into one of the phones on the columns and knocked it off its cradle, and the dial tone was nightmarishly loud. She hung it up fast, pretended to be busy at a machine when she thought someone noticed her.

She waited.

No one was cuffing her. Okay, safe so far. She continued on, leaning past a whirring machine or a stack of boxes to see if the next aisle was clear.

The constant patter of the TV news teams ran in the
background, and she tried to ignore it, the constant commentary on her life, her every public appearance since she was three. First, they were finishing up with Susannah—the water company, LSU dean-boinking loon.

“Oh, definitely,” the loon was saying. “She’s certifiable.”

A few seconds later, they switched to another reporter who was interviewing her second-grade teacher. “We all knew Bobbie Faye was a little high strung, but we were very well-practiced on our fire drills!”

She peered around the cabinet again, didn’t see anyone, and started to step out when someone snatched her back, hand clamped over her mouth.

Trevor.

Who pointed to another worker she hadn’t seen. She would have stepped out in front of him. He pulled her back into a nook out of most of the employees’ lines of sight.

“Jeez,” she hissed, low, “you could have signaled you were behind me.”

“I didn’t want the employee to hear.”

“I think you just like scaring the crap out of me.”

“That, too.”

She smacked his arm.

“So, genius, how are we supposed to get out of here?”

“Besides running for the elevator?”

“And then we teleport to Plaquemine? You said you had ideas.”

“There are a couple of helicopter outfits not far from here that ferry workers to the rigs. I was planning on stealing a helo.”

“Wow, subtle. ’Cause no one’s going to miss a whole helicopter.”

“I didn’t say it was a
perfect
idea.”

“Wonderful.”

She scowled at him. Then sunk her head into her hands. This wasn’t his fault. She had to remember that. She was the one who’d gotten
him
into this. He’d been grouchy, but very helpful. She could deal with grouchy. Especially sexy grouchy.

She stared at the floor, listening to the patter on the TV, then glanced up to see yet more aerial footage of the burning shack.

She grinned at him.

“What?”

“I think,” she whispered, “that it’s time for someone to get an exclusive on the Bobbie Faye story.”

She looked back at the local network station, proudly displaying its contact number at the bottom of the TV screen. She eased around to one of the columns and grabbed the phone. When she was done, it was all she could do not to throw both hands in the air in a mock “touchdown” score.

“We have a breaking news alert,” a woman reporter said, interrupting the second-grade teacher’s prattling and riveting Bobbie Faye and Trevor to the TV. “Ms. Sumrall’s alleged partner in the bank heist this morning has been whisked out of the jail and into an ambulance. We’re trying to get word on the scene as to exactly what happened.”

She noticed Trevor had been holding his breath and let it out slowly. They both craned around a cabinet to get a view of the TV. The scene switched to Cam’s state police station where a mob of reporters were drilling the police representative, Cam’s friend Benoit, with questions. He stopped them with universal cop sign, hand up, palm out.

“We don’t have any comment at this time.”

“Is it true,” one reporter persisted, “that he was poisoned?”

“Again, no comment.”

“Or,” the same reporter continued, “that when you found him, he kept repeating
nap nap nap
? Or
gold
?”

Bobbie Faye watched Benoit adopt a poker face, and she knew him well enough to know he was ticked and that the reporter was correct.

“I’m not sure where you’re getting your information,” Benoit said, “but you’re creating fascinating fiction. The man was cold and he wanted to sleep. I’m sure we’ll know more after the doctors can tend to him.”

Nap. Man she wanted a nap. Nap nap nap, her brain hummed, as she tried to shut it up.

She peeked out and their path was blocked by two people who’d entered the aisle.

Nap nap nap nap nap cold, her brain sang. Nap nap nap nap nap cold. Nap nap gold. Nap gold. Nap nap gold.

Nap nap nap nap gold, her brain kept singing. Stuck in a groove.

She fingered the tiara for the hundredth time since getting it from Alex, just to make sure she still had it, now re-tied to the front of her jeans.

Nap nap nap gold.

Nap gold.

She looked down at the tiara.

Nap. Gold.
Ton trésor est trouvé
. Nap. Gold. Treasure.

Jean Lafitte had been given Napoleon’s gold, just before Napoleon was exiled to Elba. She grew up hearing this story a hundred times in high school and another thousand at the Contraband Days Festival.

Napoleon’s gold. Treasure.

Oh, holy hell.

She looked at the odd markings on the backside of the tiara. Marks she’d grown up thinking were nothing more than scratches garnered through years of wear and tear.

“What’s wrong?” Trevor whispered as she turned the tiara to catch the light so she could see the markings a little clearer.

“Fuck,” she whispered back.